Reflection on John Lewis

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those [Jim Crow] days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

John Lewis; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html

Those eloquent words expressed by the dying John Lewis may persuade Americans to recognize the almost unimaginable, daily horrors of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, horrors every black family living in southern, southwestern, and Border states experienced. It may be easy for some to claim we’re not part of that horror, that that was in the past and in locations where we didn’t live, however, as William Faulkner so perceptively wrote in the novel, Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The power of Faulkner’s observation can be seen in today’s racial turmoil that has given rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and to the drive for the removal of statues and monuments honoring Confederates who were traitors to their country during war and unapologetic advocates of enslaving humans for their personal profit.

In Lewis’s remarkable deathbed essay, he urged Americans to “. . . study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time.” So, in honor of the life and indomitable spirit of John Lewis, I offer the following brief reflection.

Who Was Edmund Pettus?

Many Southerners might tell you he was the son of a wealthy planter, a lawyer, distinguished citizen of Selma, and a great Alabamian deserving of all sorts of accolades. Some might try to amend that by adding he fought the Civil War to keep slavery alive and well. Others would focus on his years of service as a decorated Confederate general and try to steer you away from the not so edifying fact he was also the Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

Historians, on the other hand, like University of Alabama history professor John Giggie, cite the record of his lifelong love of and support for white supremacy. According to Giggie, “Pettus became for Alabama’s white citizens in the decades after the Civil War, a living testament to the power of whites to sculpt a society modeled after slave society.” Here’s how James W. Flynt, University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University, assessed Pettus: “His fanaticism is borne of a kind of pro-slavery belief that his civilization cannot be maintained without slavery.”

Edmund Pettus was an unrepentant white supremacist and that’s who the City of Selma proudly named that bridge after.

It was on that bridge in 1965 that hundreds of peaceful civil rights advocates marching to Montgomery were attacked and beaten savagely by white Alabama State Troopers. It turns out that bridge may be renamed after an extraordinarily courageous black man whose skull was fractured in the infamous 1965 melee by the baton of a white State Trooper; that courageous man was John Lewis. Perhaps if that bridge were renamed, Americans might be able to put Edmund Pettus where he belongs in the historical perspective of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism and white racism and better understand why John Lewis fought so hard throughout his adult life for the rights guaranteed to all citizens by the U.S. Constitution.

Even if Edmund Pettus’s name is removed from the bridge, no mean feat in a state where such removal is only with the consent of a very conservative legislature, Americans should never forget who he was and what he and his fellow white racists stood for. We also should never forget the violence they unleashed on black Americans like John Lewis with the consent and support of the State of Alabama. Thankfully, we can celebrate the reality that Lewis and thousands of like-minded civil rights activists became the antidote to Jim Crow terrorism and to the poison that infected people like Pettus.